Organizational Change and Organizational Communication Effectiveness in a Government Agency: Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses.

Salem, Philip; Barclay, Fay; Koval, Renee; Bryant, Leah

A large government agency had been experiencing a variety of changes. The new head of the agency approached communication researchers about doing analyses of the effectiveness of communication in the agency. The researchers conducted two studies: a qualitative one to identify organizational and organizational communication themes, and a quantitative one to describe the relationships among and between factors. There were two purposes of the studies described here. The first purpose of this paper was to describe the relationships between key communication factors and organizational outcomes in an organization experiencing significant changes. The second purpose was to describe the ways in which researchers employed qualitative and quantitative methods. The results identified some unique communication characteristics of the organization. The paper concludes with a description of the benefits of the mixed methods used in the studies. Contains 47 references and 7 tables of data. (Author/RS)